National Trail Elementary School hosted Discovery Day, Friday, March 31. Students were given the opportunity to go hands-on with a wide variety of skills, tasks and hobbies.
NEW PARIS — National Trail Elementary School held its Discovery Day on Friday, March 31.
Discovery Day is an event where students have the opportunity to go hands-on with a wide variety of life skills, hobbies and professions.
“The program originally started during the 2019-2020 school year,” said National Trail Superintendent, Bob Fischer.
“The only reason I remember that is because it started during Covid. The previous school year we had visited one other school district. A former staff member of ours, who was a teacher in our district, took an administrative job in the other district. (Principal Ed Eales) had reached out — she was working at Graham Elementary in Saint Paris, and we went and observed kind of what they did.”
Fischer explained the reason the program was created was due to funding issued from the Governor’s office to ensure student wellness in Ohio.
“Part of that was to be used to try to incorporate enrichment opportunities for students. One of the challenges I laid out to our administrators was what can we do amongst the buildings to create some enrichment opportunities throughout the day?” Fischer said. “And we also created something down the line for our teachers to do to create enrichment opportunities after school as well.”
According to Fischer, the wellness funding through Governor DeWine provided opportunities between elementary, middle school and high school for learning experiences and clubs of all kinds.
Fischer noted, students have been involved in sewing club, volleyball club, roleplaying club, book club and Fab-Lab, just to name a few.
“The vision of it is just to give the kids choices about doing some things they’re interested in,” said Elementary Principal Eales. “They learn what their teachers are like. The teachers do some activities based on things they like, things like cooking. We have dough-much-fun where they make playdough. We’ve had a dog trainer come in to teach the kids how to train a dog. We’ve had our SRO (School Resource Officer) do a law enforcement group,”
“So we put a list of all the groups together — Krista Alldred does — then the kids make a choice,” Eales said. “They pick a first, second and third choice, then we sort them out so they get one of their top choices and get to go to their club and be able to do some things.”
Eales said the program has allowed teaching staff to get to know their students better while working hands-on with them, as all grading and classroom restrictions are temporarily lifted. “Dough-Much-Fun goes from kindergarten to fourth grade. So, it’s kids that don’t typically see each other all mixed in.”
Fischer added, student reception has been very positive. “They get to do things that are fun.”
Elementary teacher Ashley O’Diam said students are given the chance to do something they are passionate about, rather than traditional learning. “They get to learn what they prefer to learn. It’s their interest, or what they are passionate about. But they also get to find friends that are similar in that interest, even if they’re a different age from them,” O’Diam said.
Alldred noted, students who do not usually excel in classroom-based work have shown positive signs after Discovery Day, having been stimulated by hands-on tasks and skills.
“We’re finding when we have conversations with our colleagues, we say ‘oh this student did awesome with their science experiment and they really know a lot about water.’ And these are students that do not excel in the classroom. So, they get that positive experience from school they don’t always necessarily get,” Alldred concluded.
Fischer said many of the activities teach students without the student realizing they are learning. “With things like cooking they learn they need a fourth of a cup of this. But you have to learn what a fourth is first of all,”
“It helps realize, not only learning things, but putting it into a true, real-life example for the kids,” he added.
Discovery Day may be a positive experience for both teachers and students alike, but it adds more to the already overfilled plate of the staff.
“It’s a lot of extra work. But that’s why we do it in the morning so the teachers can come in early, and they can prepare. But it’s a lot of extra work ordering the supplies and getting everything and doing everything. But I think we’ve seen a lot of good from it and, like Mr. Fischer said, — the kids are so excited,” said Eales.
Discovery Day is scheduled once per quarter, with four events each school year for the elementary. Eales noted, guests are even invited on occasion to work with the kids in their chosen professions, such as veterinarians, police and even the school culinary staff.
The event is always aimed to be fun and lighthearted, while teaching students how to operate in the outside world on their own.
“We have truly worked on, over the last several years, continuing to make strides to make education feel different for our students. I’ve mentioned ‘It’s Better to be a Blazer’ countless times, but the reason we do that is we want learning to be more than just sitting in a classroom, learning how to subtract, add and multiply,” Fischer said. “We want to make sure, as much as we possibly can, the things they are doing in classrooms, and how it’s going to apply to them in real life,”
“It’s just one of the many examples of why it is better to be a Blazer. Because we’re willing to take time away from testing and focus on real life. Which is what we need to be training our kids to do,” he added.
Reach Nathan Hoskins at 937-683-4057.
